[ Retro GIF of the Week ] Digital Still Life
February 15th, 2013 by Benj Edwards
Click to see other views of this image: [ Original Size ] [ 2X Zoom ] [ 4:3 Ratio ]
Have you ever seen an edible still life rendered in 16-color EGA?
It appears that this image, which shows fruits and vegetables, cheese, and a napkin or folded tablecloth, originated as either a video capture or a scan of a photograph that was then digitally cleaned up to isolate the centerpiece in absolute blackness.
I have no clue as to its ultimate origin, but I found that it gained its June 7, 1988 file date from either a BBS file section or a CD-ROM collection, as I’ve discovered a number of other GIFs on cd.textfiles.com with the same file date. (By the way, I cannot overstate the historical importance of that collection. It’s brilliant.)
I haven’t mentioned this before, but I’ve started adding a 4:3 aspect ratio view in the image links above when necessary. This image has dimensions of 640×350 (a 4:2.1875 ratio), but when it was viewed on monitors of the day, it would have been stretched into a roughly 4:3 aspect ratio, making the pixels appear non-square. When viewed today on our precisely square-pixeled displays, the original non-4:3 image appears vertically compressed. So I have manually corrected it to 640×480 in the 4:3 view, which should approximate the view you’d see on a vintage computer monitor at the time.
| Retro GIF of the Week Fact Box | |
| Source File Name: | FRUIT1.GIF |
| Oldest Known File Date: | June 7, 1988 |
| Source File Format: | GIF – 87a (non-interlaced) |
| Dimensions: | 640 x 350 pixels (EGA) |
| Color Depth: | 4-bit (16 color) |
| Color Resolution (palette size): |
6-bit (64 colors) |
| Origin Platform: | IBM PC |
| Derived From: | Unknown |
| Creation Date: | Circa 1987 – 1988 |
| Artist: | Unknown |
| If you know more about the origin of this image, please leave a comment. | |
